Read SAS file to get meta information

Very new to data science technologies. Currently working on reading a SAS File (.sas7dbat).

Able to read the file using :

SAS7BDAT('/dbfs/mnt/myMntScrum1/sasFile.sas7bdat') as f:
    for row in f:
      print(row)

Row prints all the data.

When we view SAS files in SAS viewer we can see metadata E.g. Label Information & variable (column names) used on actual data

How can I read this metadata in Spark (Databricks) using Python ?

Solution 1:

Did you try pyreadstat?

It can directly read metadata.

    import pyreadstat

    df, meta = pyreadstat.read_sas7bdat('/path/to/a/file.sas7bdat')

Solution 2:

Most data analysis in Python is done using the pandas library which has a method called 'read_sas' which preserves the meta-data unless you are being ordered to use spark I strongly recommend pandas. Here is a set of instructions for SAS users: https://blog.dominodatalab.com/pandas-for-sas-users-part-1/